I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. I 



iff. .G:f&A4 



I UJflTED STATES OF AMERICA. S 



/ 



MRS. GUENEY'S 



APOLOGY 






■^yy^A^l^^^'^ 






MES. GURNET'S 



A.F O L O G Y 



IN JUSTIFICATION 



MRS. 



'S FRIENDSHIP 



PHILADELPHIA. 
WILLIAM BROTHERHEAD. 

No. 218 South Eighth Street. 



MDCCCLX. 







IBnteredy according to the Act of Congress, July 23, i860, ly WILLIAM BROTHERHEAD, in the 

Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Eastern District of Pennsyhar.ia.'] 



PREFACE 



In presenting to the world the 
extraordinary document which follows, 
the Publisher deems it fit, by way of 
Preface, to advert briefly to the principal 
circumstances and persons connected with 
this great outrage, which it embodies, 
upon the sensibilities and morals of the 
public — distinctly repudiating, himself, 
any endorsement of the views of the 
misguided writer, and deeply regretting 
the scandal which has attached in con- 
sequence of her acts to the influential 
Society of Friends, and to the numerous 
high families, with which she is allied, 
both in England and America. 



The Gurney Family is known wherever 
on the Eastern or Western continent, phi- 
lanthropy, charity, liberality in its most 
comprehensive meaning, scholarship and 
literary ability of the highest order, or 
wealth in the most profuse exuberance, 
becomes the theme of the social circle or 
the text of the author's pen. It is, more- 
over, one of the most notable and ancient 
of the English aristocracy, dating from the 
time of the Conqueror, ever since when 
they have held wealth and position in the 
County of Norfolk, where nearly all the 
various members of the name still reside. 
In England's early and stormy days they 
rendered essential service to the State in 
many famous battles both at home and 
abroad — for it was at a comparatively 
recent date only that this till then redoubt- 
able race became identified, through some 
of its branches, with the pacific and lowly 
doctrines of the Quakers. 



They are closely connected with fami- 
lies here of the very highest respectability 
of character — the celebrated John Joseph 
Gurney having taken a wife from this 
city ; and no man in the Society of Friends 
ranked equal to him in his day, either in 
religious influence, mental ability, or excel- 
lence of heart. His indeed gave the name 
to the Gurneyite Orthodox Friends, of which 
branch of that sect he was the acknow- 
ledged leader. He died about twelve years 



ago. 



His only son, John Henry Gurney, 
who was the heir not merely of his father's 
wealth, and name, but of his good char- 
acter, is the betrayed husband of this 
story. He is the present representative 
in Parliament of King's Lynn, Norfolkshire, 
and is noted for his liberal political senti- 
ments. He is now forty years of age. 

His wife, Mary Gurney, the author of 
this letter, was the daughter and only 



cliild of Eichard Hanbury Gurney, a first 
cousin of John Joseph, and belonging 
to the elder, wealthier, and represen- 
tative branch of the race — ^he, Richard, 
deceased only within a few years, having 
been a younger half-brother, and the only 
one, of the actual head of the Family — 
the venerable Hudson Gurney, of Keswick, 
F.R.S.,F.A.S., Ex-High Sheriff of Norfolk, 
etc., etc. 

Whilst Hudson Gurney it is true in- 
herited principally the patrimonial estates, 
Richard, his half-brother, became the heir 
of his own mother, who had been a Miss 
Hanbury of the wealthy family of London 
brewers of that name. This fortune, over 
a million sterling, became at Richard's 
death the inheritance of his daughter Mary, 
the author of this letter, now about twenty- 
eight years of age, and the mother of two 
or three children. 

Samuel Gurney the eminent banker 



— 6 — 

and philanthropist was a brother of John 
Joseph, and Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, whose 
labors and sacrifices to improve the dis- 
cipline of the great prisons on both conti- 
nents have won her a name to be envied, 
was his sister. Another sister was the 
wife, and zealous assistant, of Sir Thomas 
Fowell Buxton, celebrated in the annals 
of British Emancipation. 

Mrs. Gurney is thus allied by descent 
and marriage with families of the first 
note both in Europe and America, and 
holds in her own right an almost princely 
estate. She was constantly, up to the 
very period of her departure, anticipated 
in her lightest wish by a husband who 
knew no will but her own. With such 
surroundings, elevating her to the very 
highest sphere of English social life, with 
all its splendors and attractions, and 
securing to her the enjoyment of every 
rational pleasure, after thirteen years of 



— 6 — 

married life, she voluntarily renounced her 
husband, her children and family, not in 
any moment of passion, but through a 
calm conviction of reason, as she herself 
states, and left England, the mistress of 
a common groom from her stables. 

There can be no pardon nor extenu- 
ation for this great social crime. 

But the motives which led to it 
are well w^orthy of the reader's patient 
consideration. They are stated in her 
letter with logical precision, and at the 
same time with the apparent enthusiasm 
and tenderness of a heart which had suffered 
and loved intensely; and whatever the 
explanation, whether deducible from an 
exaggeration of facts, or an artful use of 
language, her words really seem to be 
stamped with the seal of social martyrdom. 

Whilst the general tenor of the doc- 
trines she enunciates cannot fail to admin- 
ister a shock to every healthy mind, it is 



not necessary for the cause of morality, 
and it would be unjust indeed, to denounce 
her letter in toto. 

Every authentic history of personal 
experience forms a helpful addition for the 
guidance and behavior of mankind. 

The deplorable consequences of an early 
and hasty marriage, as portrayed in her own 
history, may serve as a useful beacon to rash 
youth in all ages to come. 

Her earnest plea on behalf of Personal 
Merit cannot fail to win its way to many 
hearts — at least in this Country, the foster- 
home of the plebeiance and of democracy. 

But to her concluding argument espe- 
cially are attention and respect due. 

The investigations heretofore made in 
this Country and Europe have developed a 
frightful catalogue of diseases and deaths 
resulting from inter-marriages ; and more 
recent examinations in the wards of Hos- 
pitals, in the Asylums for Feeble-minded 



— 8 — 

Children, in Institutions for the Deaf and 
Dumb, and Blind, trace directly those mon- 
strosities and defects of organization, in a 
preponderating number of cases, to marriages 
of this character. "Whether her immediate 
example furnished any confirmation on this 
head, the meagre details of the whole affair, 
which have been permitted to be divulged, 
do not afford any certain information ; that 
it has been so in other branches of her 
family, and that the dread of it was upon 
her own mind, is most apparent in her letter. 
Her authoritative and vehement invec- 
tive against these internecine marriages, it 
cannot be doubted, will draw prominent 
attention to the subject ; and on this account, 
and many others, some of which have been 
indicated, Mrs. Gurney's Letter requires at 
least no "apology" for being made public. 



MRS. GURNEY'S 



A. P O L O a Y 



Paris, January — , 1860, 



Dear E * * * : 



Your name has been always on my lips 
and in my heart, and you alone of all the 
world have never questioned me. I come to 
you again, E * * *, as I have so often — as 1 
did when we were children, when you folded 
me trustfully in your arms — and say to you : 
I am as I was then; and I hear you say: Tell 
me nothing, for I believe you always, and 
there must be no questioning between us. 



-10- 

What I shall write to you will not be to 
cast a doubt upon our perfect and entire 
sympathy by any explanation, but to fulfil 
what I feel to be a duty towards you — to put 
you in possession of all that may weigh in 
the least degree with those at all under- 
standing my nature, before whom you care 
to justify your steadfast attachment to me, 
though the performance of this duty, dear 
E * * *, may impose upon me the revelation 
of my inmost life. If, in your judgment, 
there will be here presented aught of such 
justification, show it to them, wholly or par- 
tially, just as you think well, remembering 
that this is for your sake, not my own. My 
justification it would be needful to make 
before a much wider tribunal, for I have 
perpetrated an act which the whole con- 
ventional world have leagued together, in 
ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy, to de- 
nominate a crime, and I could expect little 
or no sympathy from that wide bar of public 
judgment that knows nothing of me nor of 
my surroundings, and which never could be 
made to comprehend my nature; or, compre- 



— 11-^ 

bending it, would not even then, at this day, 
be prepared to accept any argument or ex- 
planation in extenuation of my course. 

E * * *^ you remember me at fourteen; 
you remember the time we returned from the 
visit to Wymondham; you remember how, 
repulsing the cold influences overcoming me 
in spite of myself, I dashed down in the car- 
riage the plain bonnet they had asked me to 
wear that day, and stamped on it, and let 
all my hair fall down upon my shoulders, 
and said: I am free. You remember it well. 
And then, at last, when the carriage reached 
the house, how we threw ourselves into each 
other's arms, and I had no more courage, 
and feared to avow the act, telling them you 
sat down on it — and you were still; and 
then how I cried all night, that I denied the 
truth of my nature— that I was not free. 

E * * *, that day repeated itself through 
my life — in every act, in the worship of God, 
in my marriage, in the very conception of 
my children ; and I looked forward to its last 
repetition only in my death. 

It is past now — my living death is over. 



— 12 — 

I have chosen between the universal con- 
demnation of the world and my own sense 
of right; not in any sublime way, but in the 
simple, truthful way my nature craved. I 
lie down in the evening and rise in the 
morning, for the first time since a child, 
blessing God for my existence. Nothing 
can rob me of this now but death alone. I 
have that treasure to a woman's heart that 
a woman can alone understand — the open 
avowal of the love that controls her being. 
With it, part of it, all of it, is the man, free 
from prejudice, filled with every noble aspi- 
ration, who is its object. Should I, I ask 
you, have preferred the reputation which the 
world accords to her who, yielding to its 
forms, becomes daily the living lie it ap- 
proves? 

They who go on disposing of human in- 
stincts, human affections and human brains 
in their own way, according to their own 
sense of right and wrong, should go further ; 
they should change their meeting-houses and 
churches into monasteries and convents, and 
watch the religious aspirations they would 



— 13 — 

control by daily and nightly supervision. Into 
their homes they should introduce harem es- 
pionage, that the bodily instincts, which 
they hold in enforced compliance, may never 
have an opportunity to assert the truth about 
themselves. 

Heresy and adultery, the two excommuni- 
cative words, which social life suspends over 
the doomed head of a woman w^ho thinks 
and acts contrary to its rules of action, have 
not that full power and effect they are sup- 
posed to have. Nothing but actual physical 
imprisonment of the body, and, if it were 
possible, of the mind, can prevent a woman 
from becoming the secret avower of her be- 
lief and of her instincts. The excommunica- 
tive words do not restrain from either of- 
fence ; they only develop that unquestionable 
vice of woman's weakness, hypocrisy. 

The brain, when infidel, is infidel by its 
own proper organization, and they who as- 
sail its infidelity strike vainly at the God 
who made it, and implanted it in every new- 
born s8ul ; the body, when infidel to the con- 
nection in which it is placed, is so by its 



— 14 — 

own proper instincts, and they, who attempt 
to control it, strike, likewise, at a law of its 
creation. 

When will narrow-minded, bigoted men 
learn that the one absolute, controlling law 
of a woman's nature is love — that it is the 
only good and desirable thing about a wo- 
man — the only reliable thing about her? 
They can trust her, with her love, to live in 
a house of prostitution ; they cannot control 
ter, without it, by the most absolute, social 
ostracism. 

And this love, what is it ? It is a power 
present always in the world, which, recog- 
nized by two like natures, thenceforth binds 
them to each other, beyond the control, and 
in violation, if need be, of any other law — 
as my mother's love bound her to my father, 
and my father's love bound him to her, and 
gave me my being — a being cradled in the 
tenderest, truest passion that ever existed 
between two human beinsis. 

How long have I been in ascertaining and 
yielding myself up to this divine law ! T\Tiat 
wasted years! What subjections derogatory 



— 15 — 

to the vilest nature ! What hypocrisy, dis- 
honoring to God! What suffering have I 
caused this man, assigned to me alone, since 
that day on which I first in him recognized 
myself! 

It seem so long ago; it seems far longer 
to me than the time makes it ; it seems as if 
an eternity had rolled backward to that day. 

Oh, I had questionings of right and wrong 
in that fathomless interval of despair, far 
other, far deeper, than all I had been taught 
or could be taught by their lips — question- 
ings that brought me to the very brink of 
death. 

Why should I have loved him? Why do 
I love him ? What is it I love in him ? All 
this I have asked myself a thousand times, 
and there has never been, can never be, an 
answer to all this questioning. 

Yet I say now to you: Why should I not 
love him? What is there not to love in him? 
My heart only answers : What is there in me 
that I should be loved, that I should know 
that joy which in its tiniest moment makes 
all vears of other time a mockery? 



— 16 — 

And these questions do we ask each other 
daily and nightly forever. 

And yet there is one reason, they say, why 
I should not have loved him — one word there 
is which the world places as an impassable 
barrier between us — a word that has never 
crossed my lips till now — a meaningless 
word, and yet involving in their eyes a 
crime as great as that adultery which I 
commit — just as great, for both are equally 
meaningless as touching our relation. 

And that word expresses the social posi- 
tion he bore me. Rather than have been 
his lawful wife even, I might have been a 
king's mistress, or any nobleman's paramour, 
with less offence. 

And I, who was the reputable bawd of 
marriage rites, was I above him? I, a daily 
oflfence against decency in obedience to the 
same social law that would have forced him 
to life-long humility? Was I above him? 
How? In what way? I, sunk, in the abase- 
ment of my own weak unnatural compliance, 
below the veriest nameless outcast? Could 
I be above anything? Was he not at least 



— lY — 

my peer? He, who, if we leave too such 
vapid questions of distinction, is Hyperion 
to a Satyr compared in person with me — 
short, fat, little body that I am ^ 

I have silently asked myself in his arms, 
when I dared not soil our lips with their 
utterance, about these words — groom and 
adulterer. Yet well I knew that they had 
no relation to our love — that they were but 
words — that a true soul no social contami- 
nation defiles or degrades — that nobility un- 
recognized and virtue an outcast, wherever 
placed, are eternally the same. 

I had learned these lessons from a parent's 
lips. The example of my own true-hearted 
mother had taught me this. My own life 
had been given me in violation of society's 
teachings. 

Noble-hearted woman! who could say (I 
their child, and the only one that blessed at 
last their union, nearly a year old then:) 
Richard Gurney, I have withholden from you 
nothing ; I have sacrificed all at the altar of 
love — even my little Marian — yet I ask no 
formal bond of union in return; I care not 



— 18 — 

for it. What I had when our little one's life 
began — what I have now — what I know 
nothing can deprive me of now — your love 
— contents me. And he as nobly answered : 
Not for the sake of it, Mary, for it will 
have but little acknowledgment from my 
kindred or the world; but for the pride of 
the open avowal, and for the sake of our 
tittle girl, I marry you. 

And this love, so true, so self-immolating, 
met, as he anticipated, with no approbation 
from his family. Tou remember how my 
husband, as an especial favor, asked Miss 

, and would solicit the members of his 

family, to accompany me to see my mother 
— a woman as far above them all in every 
instinct of her soul as was my father — ^the 
true representative of the Lords of Gournai 
and Le Braii. 

Yet such was the aiSfectation of superiority 
they always persevered in! 

I know the world says we who are of Eng- 
lish lineage never look so low to find high 
things. 

This is not, and was never, true of me nor 



— 19 — 

of my blood. I would, were it needful to 
find my ideal, as my father before me, search 
through any situation, just as men dig 
down for jewels; and I would have delved 
to the uttermost profound for tha^ which I 
now possess. But he whom I loved was not 
so far ; he was near me by the permission 
of that social law we have oflfended. The 
home of his family became established near 
my own. He was oft actually beside me, 
and separated only by that word from me ; 
nay, he had right to touch me by permission 
of this social law — ^was charged temporarily 
with the safety of my life even — could speak 
to me, but respectfully — respectfully! He 
who was in reality of kindred blood, and 
made for me — for me — whom they paid 
court to, not because of the instinct of that 
blood, but because of the narrow thrift of 
my kinsmen. 

But enough of this. I might have spared 
myself the contempt that tingles through my 
veins. 

I loved him, E * * *; that was all. He 
became all I did, all I said, my very life. If 



— 20 — 

I say more I may err, for I truly know no 
more, and shall never know more than this. 
The whole scope and measure of a wo- 
man's heart and brain, and the whole pur- 
pose of her being, is love; and her whole 
knowledge forces itself into one inquiry: Am 
I worthy of the love of him I love? And 
does he love me? But I have thought over 
all this social matter, and have asked myself 
if I could have loved him better if he had 
not been what he was — if he had been a 
member of Parliament? Well, they had been 
plenty in our family — there were, among the 
rest, uncle Hudson, and cousin Charles, and 
cousin Edward Buxton, and cousin Priscilla's 
husband; so, too, father had consented to 
be; and finally, Jackey himself was there, and 
filling Walpole's chair, or at least the edge 
of it. And what was it but too palpable a 
sham? We all knew this — men and women 
— and we lived on it meanly, enjoying the 
empty honor and the empty praises of those 
in truth below us, because they so stupidly 
praised us. Oh, it was so foolish, all this 
member of Parliament pride ! I loved Wil- 



— 21 — 

liam rather because he was not a meinber of 
Parliament — at least because it was not his 
aspiration. And then, if he had been an 
elder of the meeting ? He ! — what think you 
of that, E * * *? Or my Lord Bishop of 
Norwich — ^the Lord of diluted pater nosters 
— was he above him ? Are these the things 
to marry a breathing woman to? Does any 
one think a liaison with the Bishop would 
have ennobled me? — or the embraces of the 
elder.? 

It is scarcely needful to say to you, my 
dear, that in the above there is not the 
slightest personal disrespect intended to Mr. 
Pelham or any other individual being. 

True men are not such. A woman's in- 
stincts repel such forms of men. You may 
dress the real as meanly as an American 
slave, or you may elaborate the attire of the 
counterfeit to the antipodes of this — to pon- 
tifical robes — and the living soul of a wo- 
man will never fail to distinguish the false 
from the true. 

Why you yourself, E * * *, would have 
wept your eyes out, I am sure, if I could 



have deliberately linked myself to the life- 
less purpose in which the vitality of such 
beings ends. 

He is not one of these. He is a man, 
^ ^ ^ ^^ whom I love. Do you wonder I 
love him? It is because he is a man — a 
man, and not a hollow make-believe. 

It is so with every true woman. In her 
love she recognizes no distinction of posi- 
tion. The gods of her idolatry, like the 
statues of the Greeks — whether standing in 
a rough warehouse or in the Louvre — re- 
main unchanged in the calmness of their 
beauty and power. We ask nothing more 
of them but themselves, to gaze upon them, 
to become intoxicated, and to die with the 
love of them. Such seems to me the man 
to whom, by the profoundest law of my na- 
ture, I yield my being. 

But will the world understand this? Per- 
haps it is the accident of my place and 
estate, that, surrounding me with what passes 
by the name of power, made me see its emp- 
tiness — ^that, uniting me to the highest re- 
presentative of a religion in the person of a 



— 23 — 

son who put it lightly off, made its mean- 
ingless character apparent — that, teaching 
me to strengthen a family distinction by 
the unconscious sacrifice of myself to him 
in whose control I had been somehow left, 
taught me to question if it were right, and 
at last to rise above and throw oflf the chains 
of an unnatural compliance. 

My intercourse and secret correspondence 
with you from my early girlhood taught you 
how wayward, how passionate I was; and 
those letters are so much a part of me that 
I cannot write anything again as they were 
written. 

You have preserved them; read them 
again, even to the days that followed my 
unnatural blood-kin union and its results. 

Blood-kin union it was. Intermarriage 
always. 

There was the marriage of my husband's 
uncle John with my aunt Elizabeth, first 
cousins. 

Blood-kin union of my husband's father 
and mother, third cousins. 

Intermarriage of my husband's uncle, 



— 24-. 

Henry Birkbeck, with Jane Gurney, third 
cousins. 

Intermarriage of my husband's father with 
Mary Fowler, cousin of his first wife. 

Is it strange that such unions should 
prove unfortunate? Elizabeth Gurney and 
Jane Birkbeck only survived their marriages 
a year. Jane Gurney, my husband's mother, 
lived but four or five years of marriage life. 

There, too, in the case of grandfather and 
aunt Agatha, was the anomaly of father and 
daughter marrying sister and brother. 

There was the marriage of my husband's 
cousin Henry with Jane Birkbeck, his second 
cousin. 

Then came the marriage of Catharine Gur- 
ney with her first cousin, Edward Buxton. 

Then Rachel with Thomas Buxton, another 
pair of first cousins. 

About a year thence, after the interesting 
grief on his part at the death of his aunt 
Fry, our uncle Buxton, and his old Balls, 
John Henry brought about his marriage with 
me, both of us the great grandchildren of the 
same pair — I, a thoughtless girl then stay- 



— 25-- 

ing at Earlham, and he nearly twice my age. 
But I don't blame them. Heaven knows 
their ignorance of my natm^e, and the utter 
want of congeniality in everything between 
his and me. 

You know the ideal my heart and passions 
craved, and you know this reality circum- 
stances and family considerations brought 
me; and you know from the day of that 
marriage I was silent. For w^hen body and 
soul were in this, at last, both gone, I re- 
solved to bear all patiently and submissive- 
ly — to act and be the lie to the last. In- 
deed, as years wore on, it became almost my 
nature. I lost my inner light, as they say. 
I became a woman to look down from my 
social position and dwell in the proprieties 
forever. 

There was then but one hope for me, and 
that hope was based upon the fact that I 
could not write to you. The pure, simple 
instincts of my girlhood, the ungratified pas- 
sions, the real intelligence, lingered in me 
still. I dared not write to you — ^to you, who 
knew me so well, I dared not confess what 



* 


* 


^ 


♦ 


* 


♦ 


:*: 


^ 



— 26 — 

my life had become. Yet more — I still had 
faith in my nature, because I felt I was 
silently degrading the crowning act of my 
mother's life by my weak and unnatural sub- 
mission. I had faith over all when I first 
shrunk from the compliance with my vow, 
and when I prayed its living fruit might be 
in her image and not in mine. I felt then 
the force of nature * * 

* :{i H: * tj: * 

:^ :{: :^ * ^ :{: 

•^ rf^ <f^ •!» ^i* «t* 

Thus year after year passed away, and 
thus should I have lived and died; but I 
saw him, I heard his voice, I learned daily 
his thoughts, I revelled in his nature ! Then 
I wrote to you again ; my faith had become 
a living power ; I began a new life. 

Then came the fall, as ever before. The 
influence of social restraint was too terrible, 
and I sunk back as I did that day when 
we were children. This last assertion and 
denial of my nature brought me to the verge 
of death, but it brought me to reason also ; 
and then, an altered being, weak and broken 



— 2Y — 

down, I rose, and with one fearful, silent 
struggle, that our sex's nature alone can 
know, I was forever free ! Oh, the revelation 
of that hour ! Life seemed in a moment no 
longer hard and difficult. Its relations were 
simple, its passions legitimate, . its love su- 
preme. 

But let me narrate to you how I awakened 
to the reality of my position, my after ex- 
perience, and how at last I had the strength 
to accomplish my emancipation. 

The first few months of my married life I 
was truly not happy ; but I cannot speak of 
that period as one of unhappiness. Indeed, 
during the whole spring I did not fully rea- 
lize what that covenant means that disposes 
finally of the life of a woman, and that, too, 
at a time before the meaning of her nature 
consciously asserts itself. The novelty of 
the change, the new interests arising, the 
necessity to be a wife — all these feelings 
and emotions shut out myself from myself. 
And so it went on, month after month, in 
which I cannot recall anything that awaken- 
ed me fully to the reality of my position. 



— 28 — 



But, E * * *, it was ordered in my life that 
it should come, and it came. A simple in- 
cident defined to me the meaning of my vow. 

Among our visits to Earlham was one we 
made on the first day of the following au- 
tumn. I remember the date and the appear- 
ance of the country well. I shall never for- 
get either. The fields were undulating with 
their golden grain. Costessy Park was in 
its fullest verdure. Everything seemed re- 
joicing in the coming harvest — the happy 
maternity of earth. And so we reached 
Earlham. 

The first object I saw was Anna's child. 
It impressed me profoundly. I took him in 
my arms, and as I looked at him everything 
grew dark about me. I had been before the 
toy of a ceremony ; I was now a conscious 
wife. Beautiful lawn and woodland, summer 
breezes, kindness, marriage rites even, what 
can they avail against the first awakening 
consciousness of a crime against nature? . 

I was wholly without sympathy; there 
were none around me to understand me. If 
I had spoken my thought the very air would 



— 29 — 

have been filled with condemnation. I, a 
wife, had I a right to entertain for an instant 
such an idea? Could I dare to experience 
an instinct of aversion? Had I a right to 
say I had been violated — that I was what all 
women loathe ? 

I could not understand it ; yet there it re- 
mained, a fact of my nature, asserting itself 
against the condition in which I was placed, 
and from which apparently no earthly power 
existed to release me. 

I returned to Easton an altered being; 
but this feeling wore off somewhat in the 
routine, and in the necessities of married life 
— for his father's death, occurring shortly 
after, you remember, involved many changes 
and responsibilities, which turned, in a mea- 
sure, for a time, the current of my thoughts. 

Afterwards succeeded, at constantly re- 
curring intervals of a year or two, many 
other deaths in our families which tended to 
check my free indulgence of thought, till at 
last my feelings settled simply into a sense 
of a vague but awfiil responsibility of a vio- 
lation of the social law. 



^30 — 

Tou must recall the constant distress and 
trouble into which we were all plunged by 
the successive deaths of his sister Anna, his 
aunt Catharine, my father and the children. 

The family at I Hall, too, was a weight 

which never ceased to press upon my heart, 
and, indeed, upon my whole existence. 

And so I lived, but not among the living. 
I had my inner life and my outward life — 
what, I doubt not, other women have had as 
well as this poor one at Catton. I drummed, 
in the old school-girl way, into my husband's 
ears the set tunes for the piano, utterly un- 
observant of the music. I dressed in the 
same mechanical way to receive his rela- 
tions, and thanked God when they were 
gone — and so underwent, beneath a con- 
jugal yoke of continued kindness, a slow 
death. I entered into the life around me 
as an actress, real herself only when away 
from the stage of her action. I became the 
same that other women become, who turn 
from human faces to brute things for com- 
fort. My early passion for horses and dogs 
proved then my consolation. I had to the 



- -31 — 

full that mental nervousness which craves 
allaymcnt in action. It would be impossi- 
ble to admire a horse more than I had al- 
ways done. It was an instinct of my nature, 
just as of Landseer's, or of old Mary Breeze's, 
of glorious memory ; but I loved them now, 
for they were so much to me ! 

But when alone, immured, away from 
every one, I lived my fullest life. My imagi- 
nation went away boldly, admiringly, lov- 
ingly, to other men. They were not objects 
of jealousy, dear E * * *, for they were 
dead. 

I lived with the memories of the founders 
of our family — men who never sat upon the 
clerk's stool, and could never have claimed 
the benefit of clergy — men with strong arms 
and stalwart frames, making their deeds of 
knightly prowess known in a hundred battles 
— with the memories of Hugh, and Walter, 
and Anselm, and Girard, and Eeginald, and 
Matthew and John, who in the Holy Land 
fought at Prince Edward's side, and rendered 
their red cross a terror to the Pavnim. And 
my memory, only too tenacious, as you know. 



— 32 — 

kept each noble form before me, with all the 
vividness of a present reality. 

I lived Avith them, too, in their pastimes, in 
which — side by side with the Black Prince, 
in the eyes of their sovereign, and their gra- 
cious mistress, his Queen Phillippa, at the 
tournaments, held on the very spots where 
I daily rode — they mimicked their glorious 
achievements upon the veritable fields of 
blood which they had won. 

I admired their splendid force, their brains 
not emasculate with such education as I saw 
around me, nor hampered with narrow trade 
tricks. I wondered what work they would 
be about if they were living to-day. I tried 
to imagine how any of the family could have 
got down, step by step, generation after 
generation, to studying Greek verbs, or cal- 
culating per cents. 

Hugo alive, I knew well, would not be a 
praying banker, but abroad in the free air, 
adventuring crusades, simply and naturally, 
in whatever way the time demanded, just as 
the man I love, simply and naturally, and 
yet so irresistibly, rescued the sepulchre of 



— 33 — 

my buried hopes and desires, against the 
law and the power, the ignorance and the 
infidelity to human nature, of all around me. 
All things great are simple. In the crusades 
my ancestors adventured, they went a long 
way across the w^orld. It was as far as the 
distance between groom and lady, but not 
further. They conquered w^hat was their own 
by right of their nature and their belief, 
and with such a struggle as every one must 
undergo who undertakes the assertion of his 
right against social law. 

They conquered theirs as he did also his 
own ; and does not his seem an act like, or 
nobler, than theirs ? Is the rescue of a dead 
body a worthier act than the rescue of a 
living soul? 

It was not so hard a conquest. My re- 
quirements were simple and natural. I was 
surrounded by everything unreal and arti- 
ficial. I demanded the society of a living 
man, free from the education and influences 
of a family holding all these foolish theories 
that deprive us of the real enjo}Tnents of life 
— one who could look upon water as water, 



— 34^ 

and drink it without a homily — look upon 
food, not as a subject of prayer, but of mas- 
tication — enjoy the sunshine and air as sun- 
shine and air, and talk with men and women 
as such without shrinking from them as he- 
terodox, or loving them as orthodox too well 
— one who could listen to music and find it 
pleasant to the ear, and not be exercised 
whether God intended it should be agreeable 
— who could contemplate a picture not as 
an engine of the devil, but a work of art — 
one who could enjoy all delights as require- 
ments of nature, and not as subjects of a 
deep concern. In Mr. Taylor I found such a 
man. He looked upon all these things as, 
indeed, I also saw them; but with him it 
was not a matter which cost him question- 
ing. He knew it all without thought, and 
without education, as they call it. He lived 
in the intuitive knowledge of it. 

In the interchange of kindred thoughts 
about these things we lived day by day, 
until, unconsciously, I found myself craving 
every word he spoke. I found his presence, 
which took me back to the men of my an- 



— 35 — 

cestral pride, a necessity of my life, and, at 
last, I felt myself for the first time beneath 
an influence of love. 

The night that followed this discovery, 
when I knelt down by my bedside, his image 
stood between me and the far-off height on 
which my subjected brain had placed God. 

And when I saw him there, I struggled, as 
I had been led to believe was duty, to dash 
down the image that stood at once in the 
way of my human vows and in the very pre- 
sence of the stern methodical God of their 
education. 

Yet there it stood, and there it must stand 
forever. Yes, dear E * * *, I loved him al- 
most before I knew it ; and he I felt, more- 
over, loved me, though not a word was 
spoken between us. It was not his to 
speak, and I would have concealed from my 
very inmost self the fact of this love. 

But it could not be so forever. To main- 
tain the form of a superiority, where none 
existed, became at last an impossibility. 
We loved, and the expression of it I fore- 
saw could no longer be controlled by either, 



^36 — 

and so it came first from my lips. He was 
riding beside me, and did not reply to me. 
He said, out into the air, into the heavens : 
God has given me too great a joy. Then he 
turned to me and said: I have loved you 
from the first day I saw you. I loved you 
because I felt it was my destiny ; other than 
this I know not why; I only know I loved 
you. 

Dear E * * * , he was so beautiful, so noble 
then, in the expression of that love so long 
concealed. The earth whirled around me, 
and his arm caught me falling unconsciously. 
When I came to myself I was resting on his 
bosom, confident of its strength as of a 
breastplate of iron, though I saw his eyes 
dim with tears. 

We rode homewards in silence. There 
was a beauty in the very stones beneath our 
feet. The wayside flowers had an odor too 
exquisite to the sense. The air and sky 
were filled with an influence too beautiful 
for earth. I was very, very happy. Could 
this feeling have rested in me, I had been 
content — faithful to my duty, as I had been 



— 3T — 

taught — to have lived ever so. But my 
heart was now craving constantly the repeti- 
tion of that moment. It could not be satis- 
fied but in his presence. Hitherto patient 
only under a sense of wrong, I now began to 
be agitated by a passion in which every 
feeling of my life had centred. 

It is not necessary to recount all the con- 
flicts which it brought to me, nor to trace 
the way in which my nobler nature sunk 
gradually before the threatened penalty of 
social destruction ; it is enough to say that I 
was borne by it to the decision which in- 
volved my destiny, and I yielded to the social 
law for the last time, because I had not yet 
come to that point at which a woman, driven 
to the very presence of death by the pres- 
sure of a false relation, thinks at last for 
herself, and hesitates no longer how to shape 
her course, should even the remaining wreck 
of her life be dashed to destruction. 

Last autumn I began to feel myself break- 
ing down. I could live thus no longer. 
When the time came we usually went ta 
London, a Avhile before the opening of Par- 



— 38 — 

liament, I felt that the crisis had come. K I 
went down with my husband in any hope of 
escaping the feelings that were mastering 
me, I knew well that on my return this life 
of passion would only recommence at sight 
of its object. If I remained alone, I believed 
I had strength to put it from me — I believed 
I could part with him, if for the days or 
weeks that would follow, after I had left him, 
I might meet no other gaze than God's — if I 
might exhaust the despair that I well knew 
would follow in silence. 

I remained, therefore, at home. 

I was not deceived in myself. The arti- 
ficial being they had created of me was 
strong enough to assert itself and to sacri- 
fice the love that lay in my heart's depths — • 
but not till the last moment. It was only 
upon the very brink of my husband's return, 
that, arousing myself from the brief dream of 
happiness into which, secure in his absence, 
I had weakly fallen, I could summon the 
energy to take the draught of agony which, 
I believed, the hand of duty had prepared 
for me. 



i-39 — 

But further delay Avas now impossible. 

I had him come to me. My heart was 
like a cup overrunning; my grief knew no 
expression. He was before me, at my feet. 
T cannot describe — no one dares acknow- 
ledge what passes between lovers, sundered 
by a social law ; it is not possible to express 
that life within life, the innermost, the last. 

I have brought you to me, I said, because 
I can see you no longer — I am dying. 

My God, it seemed to me then as if my 
heart would break — as if I should go mad ! 

A moan of agony came to his lips. 

He looked up at me; the intelligence of 
his face was gone ; his eyes were dim ; the 
dispair that was in me changed his face 
to stone. 

I looked on him immovably ; I could say 
to him: We must part forever. I could 
repeat again the phrases of social life: 
There can be no honorable recognition of 
our love — its open avowal will bring dis- 
grace to my husband and odium upon my 
children. 

And how did he reply to me? Shall I 



— 40 — 

confess, even there, in that hour of my 
strength, my utter weakness! I longed for 
a pleading word. One look of tenderness, 
and I should have fallen at his feet a ruined 
being, but ruined in the acknowledgment 
and utter abandon of my love. 

Well he knew all this ; but in that crisis 
he was true to himself, and to me ; and when 
he ceased speaking, I was again strong. My 
head, my heart, every instinct of my being, 
approved his words, his looks, his actions. 

He had saved me. He, as I knew him in 
that hour, was my strength; through him I 
conquered myself. I was strong in that 
final trial, as a woman only can be strong — 
through the soul and heart of the man who 
stands steadfast to himself and to her to the 
bitter end. 

He said: Even in this hour, when every 
hope and joy of life have sunk away into 
eternal despair beneath your words, I can 
be true to my sense of right ; I believe life 
requires no sacrifice; I believe self-sacrifice 
wrongs not only her who, blindly, in its be- 
lief as right, accepts it, but those the more 



— 41 — 

for whom it is accepted. If, with your sense 
of duty, you were to sever the relation which 
binds you to them, it could bring you no 
happiness ; its severance, as you feel, would 
bring at last misery to both, for your happi- 
ness is mine. There is no rule, no duty in 
life, but the pursuit of happiness. Mine 
can alone be purchased now at the cost of 
your own, and that is mine. We must part, 
then, forever ! 

The utter despair of these words can 
never leave my heart. 

There were many things he said in this 
last interview which I recall, but it matters 
not now should be repeated. Our lives 
express them more clearly than words. He 
spoke of the false relation which he had 
gradually been led to assume, and into the 
continuance of which our passion had held 
him day by day. 

I knew well, he said, it should long ago 
have been terminated ; but I knew not then, 
as now, the controlling power that has kept 
me by you until this hour. I believed, first, 



— 42 — 

that I might love you, and that you might 
remain forever unconscious of my love. 
And so I lived till this was impossible. 
And then my life became one eternal delay 
of hope, enduring all to this last measure of 
despair. It could not be otherwise. I 
believed from day to day that you would see 
clearly, as I saw, the right, and so it might 
at last end. It is over now ! My life is 
over. My lot is hopeless, endless misery. 
I accept it for your sake — ^for the memory of 
our love. 

Then my life, my very soul, met his in one 
long kiss of agony, and we parted, as I 
believed, forever. 

I had conquered my life ; this social law 
had achieved its triumph. 



When my husband reached home I was 
strong to do the last duty which my position 
imposed upon me. I knew well that, cost 
what it would, this must also be done. I 
must live the life, to which I was bound, 



— 43 — 

openly. I went to him and told him of my 
love, of my resolution, and of our separation. 
Much passed between us at this horrible 
time ; but all that was in my heart to say 
was just these words : I love William. Of 
the rest, and of what followed, I have no 
clear remembrance. 

I only knew now that he must be gone — 
that life, hope, all were gone, though I 
remained there still that honorable thing, a 
wife! For me, it was determined that I 
should leave England for a time. I was to 
travel. A change of scene they prescribed 
for the invalid of the heart. It was always 
the same, the same ignorance of a woman's 
nature and its necessities. They would have 
me enjoy Paris, Rome. They would substi- 
tute the splendor of the Vatican for some 
little flower that might perchance come from 
his hand should I remain at home. It 
seemed so much more to them. 

Absorbed in the contemplation of the 
ruins of my life, I took no heed of these 
arrangements for my departure, but aban- 
doned myself a willing prey to despair. 



— 44 — 

When the full measure of my grief had 
exhausted itself, I arose a new being. 

From that moment I was myself I had 
driven every hope, every feeling from my 
heart. I had received from his lips the last 
sacrifice a man can offer to the woman he 
loves — the abnegation of himself for her 
happiness ; and I declare before Heaven 
that it was my resolve to do what I thought 
right, though it cost me my life ; for I had 
nothing now to live for. 

I had long followed blindly a passion that 
brought me to the verge of social destruction. 
I had renounced it. 

I had blindly followed for years a path 
of duty which had degraded every instinct 
of my nature to its last measure of degra- 
dation. 

I could feel no more — I reasoned. 

The meaning of the life I was about to 
enter upon was now distinctly before me. 
What it appeared to me, I well knew it was, 
in very reality, for I was now freed from 
my love. I had sacrificed all for duty. I 
could see now to what the blind obedience 



— 45 — 

of that duty had led me. What I was I now 
knew. 

My soul was clear from hypocrisy — there 
was not any lie upon it now. I had con- 
fessed all. My very life was laid open to my 
heart's core. My love was gone, as well by 
his will as my own, forever. 

What had I accomplished? I had pre- 
served the chaste name of wife. I had pre- 
served the honor of my husband and the 
reputation of his children. And to do it, I 
was beneath his roof, and was about to 
submit myself to his embraces without love. 

For these considerations of honor and 
reputation, I was about to lead voluntarily 
a life of prostitution, distinguished from it 
only by the social fiction of a name, and I 
felt myself more degraded for all this honor- 
able hire than she who accepts her paltry 
dole in the streets. 

I was, moreover, about to fulfil functions 
from which every fibre of my body shrunk 
with abhorrence. I was there to give life to 
offspring created in my own degradation, in 
violation of my will and nature, the effete 



— 46 — 

offspring of blood kin, children to die feebly 
before their time, or perhaps to come into 
the world, they, or their children, deformed, 
or dmnb, or blind, or imbecile. I, who was 
perfect myself, and formed to receive and 
transmit the sacred treasure of a new life, 
was to become voluntarily the matricide of 
the more perfect conceptions which should 
be mine. 

Better, in the agony of that thought, I 
said, better death than this — ^better self- 
immolation of body and soul ; it were far 
less a crime. 

And then, shuddering with horror upon 
the brink to which duty had led me, I sup- 
plicated my soul imploringly for light, as I 
asked myself the great question : Does any 
law of God sanction, shall any law of man 
have the power to continue, the bond of 
marriage where no love exists? 

And I answered it, as my children, if they 
inherit aught of my nature, shall at last 
approve, as the world shall at last come to 
understand. 



— 47 — 

Thus was I at once and forever severed 
from all former relations and left alone in 
the world. 

I write these last words quietly, here at 
my writing desk ; but that inquisition of my 
brain, it was terrible — more terrible even 
than the death I had accepted. in parting 
from him. 

But my decision was made, and I was 
calm then. 

I knew in that moment the rest of a fear- 
ful struggle of the brain — the poor weak 
brain of a woman — that swept the world, 
though, beneath her feet. 

There was grief in that family, when I 
became in that decision myself, and stood a 
stranger among them ; when the social fabric, 
his children, their father, false pride, conven- 
tional position — all had overthrow; when 
my mother's wrongs had revenge, and my 
father's love had justification, in the child of 
his life- wronged wife ! 

But their grief was joy to the agony of 
calm in which I made that decision. 

Not a tear came to my eve when I told 



— 48 — 

it them ; not a pulse stirred in my breast. 
How inconceivable to them all this agony. 

My husband was even still solicitous to 
preserve the form of a union^ now no longer 
possible in reality. One of those formality 
doctors of the soul was sent for — his uncle 
Francis. ! after all the agony I had 
passed through, I might have been spared 
the sight of one of those whose words had 
sanctioned and stamped upon me, as if by 
the authority of God, all this misery. 

But how weak and idle to me were his 
words about theological sin and social infa- 
my. They fell on my ear, in constant repe- 
tition, meaningless as the dropping of the 
beads of a rosary. 

He told me I was imperiling my soul, and 
he left me with some formal expression of * 
pious horror, when I told him I would wil- 
lingly incur that risk. 

And now I was alone in the world — my 
life still before me — severed from every living 
relation — ^to be lived or ended. What new 
connections must I assume ? Unsupported, 



— 49 — 

helpless, alone, where should I go? What 
must I do? 

In those past ages the convent doors would 
have been open to me; but my intelligence, 
the intelligence of the very age in which I 
lived, forbade me the immolation of my liv- 
ing body and my fi^ee soul. 

And then came to me aiiain the idea of 
suicide. 

I did not shrink from this thought super- 
stitiously, as fearing to rush unbidden into 
the presence of the offended deities. I had 
no such thought. It meant to me only rest 
from this great burden and weariness of life 
— to lie down and sleep while it was yet 
day — to sleep forever. 

But I was too calm for the rashness of 
this act — too strong. If they, who retired 
to the cloister from a sense of a supersti- 
tious duty, willingly endured its burden, I, 
with larger intelligence, could not sink be- 
neath their lower thought, and weakly die. 
No, I had committed no crime that I should 
die; nor were my past misfortunes a reason 
why I should voluntarily impose new ones 



^50 — 

upon my life to come. I knew I was in the 
world to live. Vigor of body, of mind, pas- 
sions, desires, reason, all that goes to make 
up a human soul, were in the full tide of 
existence ; and I was here surely not to con- 
template death, but to fulfil the functions of 
life — of a new life. 

For I had absolutely died in that decision 
to live free from my bond. I was dead to all 
past relations and connections. I was dead 
to the social world around me, as if I had 
never lived before. The consciousness of my 
identity was gone. Every eye rested strange- 
ly upon me. I was as a child new born. I 
would have put out my hands simply as a 
child, for I was in the living world, again, a 
stranger; new born, with a life in perfect 
maturity. 

And so came the final question : — 
Shall the right I have asserted to live 
apart from my husband be followed by 
cutting off every desire, by marring or con- 
cealing every beauty, by devoting the re- 
mainder of a life, already cursed by an 
involuntary indiscretion of youth, to asceti- 



^51 — 

cism, and so continue in another form the 
struggle against nature to the end? — or 
accept the creed of the man I love, and 
seek also my highest happiness in the 
gratification of that love, which every in- 
stinct of my being approves ? 

And my answer to this final question is 
before you and all the world. 

As I said at first, dear, I have no mis- 
givings about the sincerity of your afi'ection 
for me, under any changes of life; and I 
feel just as sure that you will never doubt 
the constant, undying friendship of 

Tour 



Little Mary. 



To Mrs. 



London. 



5 



